Conventional interactive applications that are provided over a network to a set top box include Video On Demand (VOD) applications that provide movies and television programming upon request. Typically, a viewer selects a program from a list and a corresponding request is sent over a network to a VOD server. The VOD server then streams the requested program back to the set top box for real-time playback. As VOD becomes increasingly popular, demand for other interactive applications, including interactive video games, is also becoming greater.
Interactive video games can be provided to subscriber households in a number of different ways. For example, stream-based, online gaming systems typically provide interactive video games to household set top boxes over the same network infrastructure as VOD. A gaming server executes an instance of a selected video game, captures frames of the game as it executes, converts the frames into video data and streams the video data down to the set top box for playback. User commands resulting from, e.g., remote control signaling are transmitted from the set top box over a reverse link back to the gaming server as input to the game in order to generate subsequent video segments.